By Kerryn Goldsworthy

Fascinating insights: The Secrets of Midwives by Sally Hepworth.Credit:Jason Steger

Samuel Kaye

Inken Publisch, $20

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Crime thriller: Moving Tigers by Bob Franklin.Credit:Jason Steger

Whether it's Bruce Springsteen's early song Wild Billy's Circus Story or Angela Carter's novel Nights at the Circus, and no matter how tawdry the details may get, there is always something hypnotic, intriguing and gorgeous about a circus story that takes you behind the scenes. Samuel Kaye makes use of this fact in his first published work, a haunting and intensely imagined novella. The story is full of talented people and deliberate loose ends, and is told by the most ordinary member of the circus troupe, who has joined in a suspiciously easy way and is now the administrator. But the reader becomes increasingly suspicious about the reliability of this narrator, who likes to tell us about his dreams. If you can imagine a story by Kafka about a circus on a circuit of small towns between northern NSW and southern Queensland, it will give you some idea of what this book is like.

A Man Made Entirely of Bats

PATRICK LENTON

SPINELESS WONDERS, $22.99

Joyously crazy: A Man Made Entirely of Bats by Patrick Lenton.Credit:Jason Steger

These startling, often surreal and sometimes very funny microfictions seem at first glance to be no more than little jokes and deliberately whipped-up confections, but most have more to them on reflection. While some do seem a little forced, they are mostly the sort of joyously crazy pieces that you'd expect from a book with a title such as this. A man turns into a bad-tempered ginger cat at the full moon, for no apparent reason. Wonder Woman spends her days wondering about all kinds of ordinary things. A man goes to Vietnam on a whim and discovers something new about his family. And the title of my favourite story in this collection is that rare thing, a Virginia Woolf joke: the narrator is a hardened writer of horror fiction, and the story is called 'To the Frighthouse'.

Moving Tigers

Hypnotic: The Circus by Samuel Kaye.Credit:Jason Steger

BOB FRANKLIN

AFFIRM PRESS, $19.99

As with a lot of crime fiction, it's difficult to give a clear idea of what this book is about without giving away the plot. The setup, however, is interesting enough to suggest a number of possible narratives when Jean Cooper and her boyfriend Andy decide to get away from their dead-end working lives in Melbourne and go on a cheap volunteering holiday to Nepal. But there seem to be problems. Both Andy and Jean seem focused on the acquisition and consumption of alcohol and recreational drugs, while poverty-stricken Nepal, with its "shonky governments and shonky rebels, the patriarchy and the caste system", is alarming. And as the story progresses, the narrator Jean sounds more and more jumpy, exhausted and paranoid, with strange reactions and terrible dreams. The end is revelatory and very frightening.

The Secrets of Midwives

SALLY HEPWORTH

MACMILLAN, $29.99

Sally Hepworth is a Melbourne writer but her novel is set on Rhode Island, where three generations of women, all midwives, find themselves in various quandaries. Hepworth does a workmanlike job of keeping the secrets of Neva's mystery pregnancy and her mother Grace's own birth, and the characterisation of these three women is also well done. Grace, the middle generation, is almost a caricature of the hippy-dippy alternative home-birth midwife but is unfortunately all too recognisable as a realistic portrait, while her mother Floss and her daughter Neva have taken rather different paths in their common profession. This is good commercial fiction, simple and sentimental but well-structured and readable, with some fascinating insights into a profession that has always been undervalued, underpaid, and not well understood.